Diversity between and within: approaches to teaching about distant place in the secondary school curriculum

Abstract

This study outlines some challenges of teaching about distant place and demonstrates how different strategies can influence school students’ framings of diversity. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of 13–14 year-old students learning about Japan in a UK school. Their changing representations of Japan were tracked in detail over a 10 week period of study. The findings show that students’ representations of Japan were multi-stranded, demonstrating different levels of sophistication depending on the aspect of the country under consideration. Learning activities that enabled contact with the lives of young people from the distant place or that involved multiple images were shown to challenge stereotypes and to encourage more nuanced understandings of diversity between and within.

Keywords:

• secondary school curriculum
• teaching methods
• diversity
• geographic concepts
• distant place

Acknowledgement

Funding from the Ordnance Survey Children’s Geographies Award 2006 is gratefully acknowledged.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liz Taylor

Liz Taylor is a senior lecturer in Geography Education in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, UK;